It's been a long time since I've bought any digital art software, Painter X did just fine for me for a very long time.

I'm now thinking about purchasing photoshop; I've seen a lot more brush sharing occur between photoshop users and I recently upgraded to a 15" macbook with a high resolution display, and photoshop supports the new display while Painter 12.2 doesn't (to my knowledge). CS6 also came out earlier this year, while Painter 12 was released back in 2011 and it seems like it's due for an update anyway.

CS6 Design standard is the only product I see on this page where Photoshop Extended is not included. I'm just wondering if anyone can speak to any differences between the software, and if anyone has any advice I'd be happy to listen. My gut is telling me to just purchase photoshop extended because I don't have experience with InDesign or Illustrator, and it's less expensive just to get photoshop. However, if anyone has had a great experience with illustrator or if Photoshop 6 and Photoshop Extended STE 6 are basically the same product I may as well fork over a little more for a larger software package.

The Adobe website seems a little vague to me on what the difference between the two products is.

Also, I recently installed Windows 7 Professional on this computer. If anyone can tell me whether they've had a better/worse experience running photoshop on a Windows vs a Mac that would be helpful to me, as it looks like I'll need to choose which OS I'm buying this license for. Thanks in advance for any advice. Cheers!

PS I love that the October theme is "after Sargent." Still probably my favorite painter second to Rembrandt, if I can contribute something I'll post before November rolls around.